[3.8] Ultra tanky Ball Lightning Guardian | CI 11-15k ES | 3-5m Shaper DPS

I saw another guardian build that claims to be fast and uses scorching ray. Also uses almost the same gear this build uses. Does anyone have experience with scorching ray as a guardian?

I guess overall I am digging the guardian ascendancy and want to experiment more with it.

I have some trouble picturing scorching ray as being fast. If you need to stop and channel each time you see a pack, it's probably gonna be slowish.

I'm thinking of turning my elemental hit hierophant into an elemental hit guardian. There are a couple of downsides by doing this:

-we lose a totem (which is 25% of our damage)
-can't leech energy shield
-since we are moving toward the intelligence side of the tree, instead of dexterity, we are losing movement speed, jewel slots, and crit.

These downsides are pretty big, but the tankiness might be worth it.

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thomzon wrote:

I have some trouble picturing scorching ray as being fast. If you need to stop and channel each time you see a pack, it's probably gonna be slowish.

I watched a few of the vids tonight. It's slow so I don't know why they state it's fast.

Has anyone attempted using spark? I assume this has bad single target dps.

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Kadamose wrote:

There's a cyclone guardian variant on the forums that I think I am going to try out. It's only 1 million shaper dps, but you can get to delve 1000+ and have all the tankiness of this build. I'm not a fan of cyclone, either - but it's WAY better than ball lightning.

Where? Can you link? I wanna see vids, I highly doubt that cyclone guardian can be any faster.
Yes, build feels slow. But I like no move shaper kills and all the tankiness.

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ShatteredEssence wrote:

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Kadamose wrote:

There's a cyclone guardian variant on the forums that I think I am going to try out. It's only 1 million shaper dps, but you can get to delve 1000+ and have all the tankiness of this build. I'm not a fan of cyclone, either - but it's WAY better than ball lightning.

Where? Can you link? I wanna see vids, I highly doubt that cyclone guardian can be any faster.
Yes, build feels slow. But I like no move shaper kills and all the tankiness.

I believe they may be referring to the cast when channelling guardian cycloner that also uses mjoner. Looks interesting and would take some minor tweaking.

I found many guardians on poe.ninja that are using that build. Some use ball lightning or arc in mjoner.

Just tested a couple of maps with Orb of Storms (5L) triggered by tempest shield. (insane casts per sec)
Felt pretty amazing, even bosses melted faster (but only tested on T7s), and legion encounters easier.

Pretty fluid and feels a lot faster, going to see what can be changed on tree to suit this setup, probably focus more on cast speed.

How do you guys deal with heavy elemental and chaos damage? Compared to the HoWA Juggernaut Build this character takes way more elemental damage (due to CI + Incandescent Heart). My char doen't feel that tanky atm to be honest :/

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rainmeadow wrote:

How do you guys deal with heavy elemental and chaos damage? Compared to the HoWA Juggernaut Build this character takes way more elemental damage (due to CI + Incandescent Heart). My char doen't feel that tanky atm to be honest :/

Hit at least lvl 90, it scales really hard with levels

Anyone looking for a really nice Brutal Restraint, for free, pm me in game.

Someone claimed 699 if anyone wants, had all good stuff for this build